On the night
of 3 February, 1820, on returning to the house at Hampstead which he
shared with Mr. Brown, the poet had his first attack, a violent one, of
blood-spitting from the lungs. He rallied somewhat, but suffered a
dangerous relapse in June, just prior to the publication of his final
volume, containing all his best poems--_Isabella, Hyperion, the Eve of
St. Agnes, Lamia_, and the leading Odes. His doctor ordered him off, as
a last chance, to Italy; previously to this he had been staying in the
house of Mrs. and Miss Brawne, who tended him affectionately. Keats was
now exceedingly unhappy. His passionate love, his easily roused feelings
of jealousy of Miss Brawne, and of suspicious rancour against even the
most amicable and attached of his male intimates, the general
indifference and the particular scorn and ridicule with which his poems
had been received, his narrow means and uncertain outlook, and the
prospect of an early death closing a painful and harassing illness--all
preyed upon his mind with unrelenting tenacity. The worst of all was the
sense of approaching and probably final separation from Fanny Brawne.
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